I was lucky enough to just play music as a living and not have a nine-to-five job. I didn't have to pay the bills so I was able to experiment.

When I was growing up, I would listen to a different album almost every night. I would do the full album experience before I went to bed and that's how I would discover a lot of music. I would kind of go into another world with my headphones on.

I was always an album guy, not a greatest hits kind of guy, not so much a radio guy. I'm not saying one is better than the other but... It was like reading a novel but shorter than that. You go into a world for an hour and you absorb yourself into it rather than just passively listening and flipping through this and that.

I wasn't ready to write my own songs when I was in my early 20s. I'm still growing but I definitely grew because of my experiences on the road and in the studio.